Is Your Journey Really Necessary?
On telling different stories.
I have no wish to add to the angst ridden dissection of campaigns now long in the past. I hope we can all agree that the failure of the “Home Publicity” programme of 1939 was entirely due to the mistaken decision to lead with the design “Your Courage…”, a message not just out of step with the public mood but overlong, confusing and demonstrably false.
The failure of the first two designs meant the whole scheme was put on ice, with very few of the third design ever seeing the light of day. A shame since this last poster, bearing the simple legend “Keep Calm and Carry On”, turned out to be phenomenally successful when it eventually landed on an unsuspecting public in the early 2000s after an unused original was found in a box of second-hand books, inadvertently detonating the Second World War’s biggest unexploded bomb.
My mum, born the year the poster was designed, was an early adopter. A copy was blue tak’d to our kitchen wall long before my dad’s first cancer diagnosis. Before that what had she been keeping calm about? The problems of the post-millennium seem almost quaint now. I can see us all in my minds eye, red poster, green kitchen, drinking tea, all still breathing, my parents barely unaware that this was their last decade. They would both die in that house, keeping calm until the carrying on ran out. Life had grounded them and though neither were happy, it is impossible to create change without imagining change and somehow that magic was lost to them. Not somehow. The law of narrative teaches us the irony that there is no change without discomfort and the human mind will perform any magic possible, will willingly accept long term despair to avoid current discomfort.
So here we are in 2024 with the “Keep Kamala and Carry On” posters taken down and the party of carrying on handing the keys to power to the party of chaos, priding themselves about how calmly they are doing it because, as is so often the case, we remain fighting the previous battle. However apt “Keep Calm and Carry On” might have been for the blitz, it was a disastrous message to instil in the subjects of the Bush Blair neo-con hegemony. Back then North Korean troops were not fighting in continental Europe. The threat of nuclear war was retro. No one serious was moving against the progressive tide within our own democratic polity. However it’s not just with hindsight that the problems were visible. Millions marched against the acquisitive blood letting of the War on Terror. I knew no one with the nouse to either prove or benefit from the sense that our economy was running high on its own supply, but the crash of 2008 was not the complete blindsiding its often portrayed as. We hoped “global warming” would be a problem for our children’s children rather than a problem we’d face ourselves but my parents would have both been disappointed but not surprised by how things have turned out. In 2005 “keeping calm” and “carrying on” were buying another round for an alcoholic, handing out cigars in the lung cancer ward.
When I lived in the past with my parents before they both died, all of us stubbornly, calmly, carrying on, my route into London depended upon a small suburban train station served only three times an hour. Arriving to a wait of less than 10 minutes was a joy. The platform looked out only to a largely empty car park, nevertheless, 10 minutes of car park was often a welcome space for contemplation. It was around this time I started getting paid to watch short films, a task that often felt like my own private clockwork orange style reprogramming nightmare. I noticed how usually I wouldn’t last more than about 90 seconds before I getting so searingly, painfully, bored and angry I’d have to drive a nail into my hand and shout “My name is Harry Palmer” to get through to the end. Pondering this agony whilst staring into my empty car park I was struck by how much more empty car park my soul was willing to look at compared with short film. How being told nothing at all was vastly better than being told anything badly.
This is why it is a different World War II poster that still resonates with me more than “Keep Calm”. Designed by Thomas Bert for the Railway Executive Committee “Is Your Journey Really Necessary?” came in two iterations, one with a Tommy staring challengingly out at the reader, the other, perhaps more persuasive, where we get to spy on a louche well-to-do couple who are demonstrably not heading on a necessary journey with a dog like that.
Put aside the context of the war and the desire not to clog the rail network with gadabouts and their tiny dogs, the question is one I ask myself every time I start to write.
OK the “really” in “really necessary” feels like a high bar. I’m not going to relitigate any arguments about precisely where creative acts fall within the hierarchy of human needs; all art is essentially frivolous and frivolously essential. Trying to let out some gasp of your experience of being is never a waste of your time but it may well be a waste of others’. When sharing a creative act with an audience you are always on thin ice.
The necessity of your own art is often exposed most vulnerably in those moments when someone else seems to have had your idea first. Or not first, but better funded. This slays us because we often live under the illusion that what matters most is novelty of concept. That our journey will be really necessary only if we’re the first to make it. Of course we know that’s not true of other people’s art. We know and moan about how nothing is new, seeing this as a modern curse rather than an inherent part of what culture is. Yet still we persist with the idea that our stories can be blown out of the water by someone else tackling the same subject. We blind ourselves to the truth that it is rarely novelty of concept that matters, always novelty of approach, of voice. The most compelling thing about the journey you are on is probably not the destination but that you are taking it.
So the next time a trailer drops that is your idea but finished and full of actors, skip the despair. Hope that it works because that’ll prove there’s an audience for things like this. Ask how is your story the same but different, which in most cases, is to ask how is your version yours? And perhaps it’s not, perhaps you really do have nothing to add to the conversation. Don’t just carry on, ask if what you are doing is really what should be done.